D-LinkNet: LinkNet with Pretrained Encoder and Dilated Convolution for High Resolution Satellite Imagery Road Extraction

Lichen Zhou, Chuang Zhang, Ming Wu

2018 · 922 citations · 22 references

Concepts

TL;DR

Road extraction is a key remote sensing task that has attracted intense research, and efficient architectures like LinkNet combined with dilated convolution can enlarge receptive fields without losing resolution. The paper proposes D‑LinkNet, a semantic segmentation network that uses an encoder–decoder structure, dilated convolution, and a pretrained encoder for road extraction. D‑LinkNet is built on the LinkNet encoder–decoder architecture, incorporating dilated convolution layers in its central module and leveraging a pretrained encoder. On the CVPR DeepGlobe 2018 Road Extraction Challenge, D‑LinkNet achieved IoU scores of 0.6466 on validation and 0.6342 on test.

Abstract

Road extraction is a fundamental task in the field of remote sensing which has been a hot research topic in the past decade. In this paper, we propose a semantic segmentation neural network, named D-LinkNet, which adopts encoderdecoder structure, dilated convolution and pretrained encoder for road extraction task. The network is built with LinkNet architecture and has dilated convolution layers in its center part. Linknet architecture is efficient in computation and memory. Dilation convolution is a powerful tool that can enlarge the receptive field of feature points without reducing the resolution of the feature maps. In the CVPR DeepGlobe 2018 Road Extraction Challenge, our best IoU scores on the validation set and the test set are 0.6466 and 0.6342 respectively.

References

22